Hello, welcome to my second annual gratitude list here at Hearth Ridge Reflections. I hope to make a list, culminating at the American celebration of Thanksgiving, of things that I am noticing and grateful about in my life. Please join me on your own blog or jot it down in your journal, I find it such an amazing practice of reordering ones focus. I find this time of year, no matter how hard I try, becomes a haze of busyness and materialism. This little project helps me to take a moment away from all of that. I miss it around here, yet I’ve been given a lovely, wild bunch of children whom I’ve chosen to home educate and that takes precedence. How are you all, dear friends? I hope this post finds you well. Yes, I do call you friends, even though most of us have never met. I appreciate you reading here, sharing your thoughts, and I pray that you walk away with a bit more hope and delight in your back pocket then when you arrived. Here is what I’m thankful for today:

Searching the shelves for our Thanksgiving books and refilling our book basket.

The delight on my daughter’s face when she realized she got a letter in the post.

The smell of peppermint tea.

Stepping out onto our deck, escaping a boiling hot kitchen, into a cool, dark, and star-drenched sky. I grabbed our constellation chart and spent a few lovely moments.

Among the many things for which I remain profoundly grateful is the fact that so much of life defies human explanation. The unimaginative and the dull may insist that they have an explanation for everything, and level at every wonder and mystery of life their popgun theories, but God be praised, their wooden guns have not yet dislodged the smallest star. It is well that this be so, for the human spirit can die of explanations, even if, like many modern formulae, they are but explanations which do not explain.

A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.

~Henry Beston, Northern Farm, p. 128-129 (emphasis mine)

{Thinking on this beautiful thought this morning, rainy, delicious smelling morning outdoors, and I’m slowly catching up on things after our holiday. What are you thinking on today? Happy Monday!}

Yesterday was one of those actual delicious mornings, wind on the face, cool and sweet, sun-kissed, and soft. My laundry was flapping away, I sat on my deck, drinking in coffee, bits of the Book of Psalms and Isaiah. The newest batch of kittens, tumbled and rolled about me, my flower baskets tickled by the same wind that kissed me. My youngest was playing in the puddles, with old ice cream buckets, grass clippings, and his sister’s little pink tea kettle.

My husband and oldest daughter were off on a farm adventure, two of my daughters were with Grandma Margaret, having a grand time, evidenced by the photos I was receiving via text. So it was just myself and my three boys, reveling in the sun and general splendor of a lovely, warm June day. These sorts of days aren’t always around. Days can be dark physically, mentally, and relationships torn. If you look hard enough, though, I believe any day can be redeemed. This just happened to be a gift day, a particularly drenched-in-beauty day. We scrambled up some of my son’s fresh eggs, and the boys, who have hollow legs, raided leftovers, also. I continued my laundry work, slowly making my way through the bedding from our Texan family visiting last week.

The act of hanging clothing on the line is so soothing to me. There is just something so satisfying about pulling the basket along after you, rough-wooden pins in hand or mouth, and slowly seeing your family’s daily life unfurl. My son’s favorite t-shirt, all the extra potty-training underwear (ha. ok, those make me grumble a bit ), table cloths, well-used for family meals, towels that dried little bodies, and swimsuits from hours of fun at the lake.

I tackled a project that had taken me three weeks to work up the nerve. It took me only about 45 minutes to complete. Isn’t that always how it is? We make things so much worse by building them up in our mind. The craft/game/supply closet was a veritable bog of random puzzle pieces, pencils, dust bunnies, leftover diapers, craft sticky letters, and flotsam and jetsam of our school year. I can’t tell you the relief I felt, packing away the Bing Crosby Christmas cds that were still out and stacking all the toilet paper in ONE spot! It’s the little things, folks.

Later morning found me blissfully relaxing under the lone tree in our front yard, yes, admiring the clothesline’s dancing occupants, talking with Ben, as he made a grass salad, and contemplating a beautiful line from Elizabeth Goudge’s A Pilgrim’s Inn,

When she had filled her basket with holly Jill sat down on the rock and waited happily for the twins. She did not find the waiting irksome, for she had been born one of those fortunate people who are never in a hurry and never restless. She had never felt restless in her life. In all that she did, in all that she saw, she was aware of a deep upspringing wonder, as though she did it or saw it for the first time. She was blessed with a mind neither retrospective nor anxious; the past and the future did not pull her two ways with remorse and dread, and the lovely freshness of each new-made moment was apparent to her focused vision. p. 314

What a wonderful thoughts… I desire to be constantly aware of a deep upspringing wonder. Isn’t that just such a lovely thought? No matter how dark life gets, wonder is there, pushing at the cracks and bruises, trying to shine through. Brushing the grass from my skirt, I took this thought into the house, where I made leftovers, tuna, and salad for lunch.

The afternoon brought more freshly laundered sheets, more reading, my boys choosing to watch some LoTR movies, since their little siblings weren’t around, the scary factor is high on those. I got outdoors and took a quick walk through the countryside anticipating running to town right after to pick up my middle girls and have a coffee with my sister. It was so unbelievably gorgeous, the birds, wind, and hot sunshine blending into a song and poem, floating on the wind, their notes following, matching the beat of my footsteps.

Grilled pork chops, deck moments gazing at the full moon, and late night banana bread baking were more frosting on the cake. What a gift, drenched with wonder. I’m saving it away to be pulled out when I need it. ~

One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons, but it had grown too dark to see the book, so she had fallen into wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen, once more bestarred with it’s tufts of blossom. In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged. The walls were as white, the pincushion as hard, the chairs as stiffly and yellowly upright as ever. Yet the whole character of the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing personality that seemed to pervade it and to be quite independent of schoolgirl books and dresses and ribbons, and even of the cracked blue jug full of apple blossoms on the table. It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although immaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine.

p. 161-162, Anne of Green Gables

{Short note to Maud -excuse me for a moment!} Oh, Lucy Maud. You just have such a way with words. And make up beautiful words, too, like silverly, yellowly…sigh. I so wish I could be your friend in real life. I know you said that your characters resemble no one in real life, but as I learn more and more about you, oh my, so much of your wonderful thoughts, love of nature, and turning from pain and choosing to focus on beauty comes through in your writing. I’m reading the first volume of your journals, gifted to me kindly by my sister, for my birthday. You know that, young Maud is very much like young Anne in many ways, right? Such a beautiful composite and interweaving of real life experiences, feelings and fiction’s glorious imaginative flights of fancy. The photos of P.E.I. in a lovely book I borrowed from the library remind me so deeply of my own trip and introduction to your beloved island. Just glorious! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting your pen to the paper and sharing pure beauty in ink. }

These two chapters were just lovely with Anne and Diana’s infamous jumping on top of Aunt Josephine in the very Sparest of Bedrooms. Of course, Anne ends up gaining a Bosom Friend from the whole ordeal. Matthew stood up to Marilla, with always humorous conversations occuring when he does.

Anne’s place names are just sooo wonderful. Dryad’s Bubble, Idlewild, The Haunted Wood, and Victoria Island, in honor of the Queen, of course.

Anne’s inattention and imagination are large factors in Matthew’s handkerchiefs being starched and a pie being burnt to a crisp. Surprise, surprise. She is moodily reflecting on the fact that she has been at Green Gables for a year.

Marilla makes Anne take a dreaded trip at TWILIGHT through the Haunted Wood to get an apron pattern from Mrs. Barry, which is just about the same as death. How could you, Marilla? 😉

Such hilarious, beautiful chapters and made all the more wonderful by simultaneously dipping into Volume 1 of L.M. Montgomery’s journals and Catherine Reed’s The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables. I highly recommend them.

Love is at the heart of every right way, and essential forgiveness at the heart of every true treatment of the sinner.

~ George MacDonald, p. 307, Discovering the Character of God

Face to Face

O Love Divine, if we can see

In our beloved so dear a grace,

When Love unveils, what will it be

To see Thee face to face?

~Amy Carmichael

{The photo is from a lovely B&B my husband and I stayed at last weekend. We snuck away for a short break and it was so nice. Meditating on these today…how is your week shaping up? I’m a grand 38 today. I feel like I’m straddling the young and old fence. Ha. Three cheers for birthdays! Happy Monday from all of us here at Hearth Ridge Farm.}

“A child conversant with the old tales accepts them with an ease born of familiarity, fitting them into his own scheme of things, endowing them with new meaning. That old fossil, those old bones, walk again, and sing and dance and speak with a new tongue. The old stories bridge the centuries.”

” ‘True to life’ may not always be true enough, ” he said. “The difficulty is perhaps in confusing truth with objectivity. By its very nature, art can never be objective. Try as we might, we can’t ‘tell it like it is.’ We can only tell it the way it seems to us. And this, of course, is what we must do — in realism or in fantasy — if we hope to create anything of durable value. We have always needed good art to sustain us, to strengthen us, even to console us for being born human. Where better can we learn to see through the eyes of others, to gain compassion, to try to make sense of the world outside ourselves and the world within ourselves?

~ Lloyd Alexander

(I’ve been thinking about this quote this weekend, especially in relation to writing. I do believe my faith is objective truth, but I think I understand what Alexander is saying here, in that life can be seen so differently through the lens of art, because of the creators behind it. It gives a more complete picture of life, because it’s not just one viewpoint. I believe even subjective art can convey objective truths, but seen at a slant and with flavor, that doesn’t make their message any less true. I saw this bit online and I believe it comes from the book Innocence & Experience: Essays & Conversation on Children’s Literature, which I very much want to read. What do you think about this? Have you read this book?)

Never be without a good book…

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

~Emily Dickinson

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust,

He knew no more that he was poor,

Or that his frame was dust.

He danced along the dingy ways,

And this bequest of wings

Was but a book. What liberty

A loosened spirit brings!

~Emily Dickinson

Living Word…

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

~Psalm 73: 25-26

Life Motto

Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass ~ 1 Thes. 5:24

On Our Book Stacks Currently…

The reason for my ramblings…

Every day we are experiencing so much. It is good to take time to reflect, to relive the experiences we have had in the past year.
For the richness of living is not only of the moment but can be best appreciated as we think it over.
~ Gladys Taber

Under the willow tree…

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
And whose hope is the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters,
Which spreads out its roots by the river,
And will not fear when heat comes;
But its leaf will be green,
And will not be anxious in the year of drought,
Nor will cease from yielding fruit.